Heart-stopping!

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This article was published 23/02/2020 (1804 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MOOSE JAW, Sask. — It was the biggest draw of her life, and it slid heavy. It carried all her hopes on its back, but it wouldn’t stop. When it finally did, Kerri Einarson slumped and stared up at the lights, her face contorted with a heartbreak that fans could see from the stands, sharp as a knife.

Then the Manitoba champion skip straightened up and gathered on the edge of the sheet with her team. Just two years ago, they’d joined forces to fight for exactly this moment, and as Einarson stood with Val Sweeting, Shannon Birchard and Briane Meilleur, they bounced a little on their feet and refocused their attention.

Yes, they’d once had the game all but put away. Yes, she’d had the winning draw at her fingertips. But now they were going into an extra end in the 2020 Scotties Tournament of Hearts final against Ontario titan Rachel Homan, and as they reminded each other, they’d have given anything to be in exactly that spot.

“We just said, ‘we would take this,'” Einarson said, of that extra-end pep talk. “‘We would love to be in this position against one of the best teams in the world. We have hammer. We’ll make the last one.'”

And they did. Homan set up well for another steal in the extra, and once again Einarson had a draw to win. It had to take a chunk of the four-foot this time, not just full eight like the last shot of the 10th. This time, she made it. It did all that it had to do, Birchard and Meilleur swept it in the way they had to, no mistake.

With that, Einarson and her buffalo gals beat Homan 8-7, and were the new Canadian champions.

“What an emotional rollercoaster,” Einarson said, blinking tears from her eyes moments after the win. “My God, this is so amazing. I’m so incredibly proud of my teammates, and they’d played so well all week. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know where I’d be today… all those shots I made out there was because of them.”

The phrase “emotional rollercoaster” almost seems like an understatement. The final was stunning: it started when Einarson’s team shot the lights out and soared to a 7-3 lead after eight ends. That lead was suddenly jerked away when Homan struck for a ninth-end deuce and then the steal of two to force an extra end.

That was the heartstopping twist that the Scotties final needed, to cap off what had been a wild week of hot shots. After the game, Homan — who had been on the receiving end of a similar wild comeback in the 2019 final, which Ontario lost — tipped her cap to the Einarson foursome, and her own team’s resolve.

“We fought right to the end,” Homan said. “In the end, she made a great shot, so good for her… that’s curling, it’s a game of inches, and a game of one shot here and there… There are a lot of teams that would have wanted to be in that final, so I’m proud of the girls. They battled hard.”

For Einarson, she did it for so many people. She did it for her six-year-old twin girls, Kamryn and Khloe, who help keep her grounded: after their mom clinched a spot in the 1-vs-2 Page playoff, they were mostly excited because it meant there would be time to go swimming the next day.

She did it for the group of friends who surprised her by driving out to cheer in the stands. For her family. For her grandparents, who gave her the love of curling. And she did it for her brother, Kyle Flett, also once a rising young Petersfield, Man. curler. He died in a snowmobile crash at age 20, and his memory has never once left her.

“This means absolutely everything,” she said. “I always wanted to play with him, play mixed with him. I wish he could be here to see this, but he’s looking down on me, and so are my grandparents, and it’s so hard to put into words. I always talk to him and I can feel him with me.”

And she’d so badly wanted to win it for Sweeting. The last two times the Manitoba third came to Scotties was as skip for Team Alberta, when she lost back-to-back finals in 2014 and ’15: the first one to Homan, the second to Jennifer Jones on the same Mosaic Place ice where she now claimed her first maple leaf.

“There were some dark days, for sure, and you wonder how you keep going,” an emotional Sweeting said. “You just keep pushing and you work really hard and you kind of tell yourself that one day it will pay off. It’s just like the clichés, but you really wonder, ‘Will it?’ It did today, so it feels really good.”

“I’m very proud of myself, but I owe a lot to my teammates as well,” Sweeting added later. “We worked really hard together. I think they wanted that a lot for me, but I wanted it a lot for them, too. It’s really special.”

Yes, it is. This week in Moose Jaw was nothing short of the second-year team’s coming-out party. They had only two rough games over the week, neither fatal (the seven-ender they suffered from New Brunswick is already just a funny story), and when they were running hot they were nothing short of sensational.

Einarson was spectacular in most performances, shooting the lights out and dazzling fans in the stands. For most of the final she was sharp and left Homan little chance to generate momentum. The 10th end heavy draw can’t take that away from her: in her second trip to a national final in the last three editions, Einarson shone.

For this, and so much more, Einarson was named the 2020 Scotties MVP. Now, she and the team will have time to celebrate the win before preparing for the women’s worlds, which kick off March 14 in Prince George, B.C.

What a week, what a game, what a show. Moose Jaw is a brilliant host city for curling. The community embraces it, almost beyond belief: store windows are decorated with elaborate Scotties art. A pub just a block from Mosaic Place painted in its window a portrait of TSN broadcaster Vic Rauter, along with his famous tagline: “Make the final…”

The opening weekend was spectacular, with a nearly sold-out crowd on the first Sunday night, but it levelled off. In 2015, when the Scotties last came to Moose Jaw, the cumulative attendance was just over 70,000; this time it was shaping up to be nearly 10,000 below that high-water mark.

In the grand scheme of these things, that’s still strong by recent standards. (In fact, it’s on pace to be the best Scotties attendance since that last visit in 2015, most of those in larger markets.) But attendance at live curling events is an ongoing concern: TV viewership is strong, but eyes from the stands are vanishing.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca